Culture Watch
Page Two, October 2010
The setting is Norway in the 1300’s, a century marked by strong loyalties to assorted family groupings and feudal overlords. It is also the century marked by the arrival of the Black Plague, which is mentioned only toward the very end of the book, producing in the reader a chill of foreknowledge for what will face the characters we have come to love.
Norway had for quite awhile been brought into the fold of the Roman Catholic Church, which held great power over the lives of the populace, power both temporal and spiritual. Gone were the days when Vikings sailed out of the fjords to plunder countries like France and England, once the Church had put a ban on “going a-viking.” Nonetheless, Norwegians were still great sailors, and traveled quite widely both for commerce and soldiering, often hiring out as mercenaries, or following one of their own lords in various skirmishes to support claimants to the throne.
Undset’s story is a complex and strangely modern tale, one involving adolescent passion and illegitimate pregnancies and parents who don’t always make good choices in the rearing of their children. In this author’s hands, however, the bad choices and unfortunate happenings are nothing like what you’ll find in our modern romance novels or scandal magazines: her characters are fully-drawn, dimensional people with flaws and consciences, people who long to live honorable lives, and who do the best they can despite their own failings and the challenges and disasters they face. They are pictured, warts and all, with compassion and intelligence and even love. As a result, we also come to care deeply about them.
Reading so long a book meant that I had to put it down (most unwillingly) from time to time, and deal with my own real life. It is a mark of my absorption in the story that I found myself waiting eagerly for those moments when I could count on being undisturbed for an hour or two. Each time, I picked up the book with a sense of joyful anticipation.
And, of course, when it was finally ended, I could hardly bear the realization that it wouldn’t be waiting by my chair of an evening, with yet another chapter to read. Great books are like great loves – delicious while they last, but when they’re done, they leave an empty room in your heart.
The title of the book refers to Olav Audunsson, whom we first meet as a 7-year-old boy. Olav’s mother died in childbirth. A few years later, Olav’s father, Audun became very ill, and took his son to his old friend, Steinfinn, with whom he had once served in the King’s bodyguard. He asked Steinfinn to foster the boy until he was of age. During a drunken evening, the two men even arranged an engagement between Olav and Ingunn, Steinfinn’s little daughter. Shortly thereafter, Audun died, leaving his manor of Hestviken to Olav. However, because of the boy’s youth, he remained with the Steinfinnssons.
The two children were reared together, and they developed an intense closeness despite teasing references by the folk of the household to the fact that they would one day wed. Ingunn was a bit of a tomboy, and she and Olav spent literally all their time together.
In adolescence, things took a natural turn, as they fell in love, but a whole series of dreadful events conspired to keep them apart for several years.
